The 4:15 Amtrak out of Chicago's Union Station smelled like burnt coffee and other people's ambitions.

Joanna Blake had been sitting in Car 7, Seat 22A - the window seat she'd specifically requested when she booked the ticket three weeks ago, back when going to Louisville for her parents' annual spring gathering had seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea - and she had been doing a very good job of not crying.

The trick, she'd learned over the past eleven days, was to look out the window and let her eyes go slightly unfocused. Let the city smear past in streaks of gray and glass. Don't let anything resolve into a specific shape. Don't look at couples. Don't look at her phone. Don't read the email again. Don't think about how the email had been sent at 6:43 in the morning on a Tuesday, which meant Derek had probably drafted it the night before, lying next to her, and she had noticed nothing - had, in fact, kissed his shoulder before she got out of bed to make his coffee, oblivious and easy and utterly, catastrophically wrong about everything.

The trick was working until the woman sat down in her seat.

"Oh - I'm so sorry, I think this is -" Joanna stopped. The woman was crying. Not politely, not discreetly. Her shoulders shook and her face was buried in her hands and she had clearly chosen this seat - Joanna's seat, 22A - because it was by the window, because the window was the right place to rest your forehead and feel the movement of the train carrying you away from whatever you were running from. Joanna recognized the logic immediately. She had been utilizing it herself.

The woman looked up, startled. She was young - mid-twenties, maybe - with dark hair and eyes that were red-rimmed and too large for the sorrow in them. She clutched her ticket and Joanna's ticket both, having knocked the latter off the seat when she sat down. "I'm so sorry," she said again. "I just - I needed the window."

"I know," Joanna said.

The train jolted into motion. They sat there for a moment, two women in the middle of their separate disasters, the platform sliding away behind them.

The young woman's name was Layla Nolan. She didn't offer the last name immediately - it came out later, somewhere around Indianapolis, when the two of them had established the particular intimacy that only forms between strangers on long-haul trains, strangers who have tacitly agreed not to ask questions and then find themselves asking all of them anyway. Layla was heading to Cedar Creek, Montana. She had a cousin there, she said, or almost a cousin - she'd grown up spending summers there, and it was the only place she could think of where the thing that was chasing her couldn't follow.

Joanna was heading to Louisville. Her parents. Her mother's careful, catastrophically well-meaning parade of "perfectly lovely men" she'd lined up for Joanna's visit, which her mother had been planning before the breakup but had redoubled in intensity after, as though the antidote to being destroyed by one man was to immediately audition replacements.